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An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

What to see this Gallery Night & Day

From an artist who makes paintings based on word-of-mouth tales of distant places to an artist who is stirring controversy and dialogue around the world, from a meatpacker’s 125-year-old art collection to a gallery’s celebration of a quarter-century, this Gallery Night & Day offers plenty of opportunities for expanding our perspectives on art.

The quarterly art crawl when galleries hold special events and receptions takes place Friday evening and Saturday during the day. Here are a few venues I especially recommend for your itinerary.

Jon Schueler
Dean Jensen Gallery, 759 N. Water St.

Jon Schueler seemed to breathe onto his canvases more than he painted them. His abstract works hint at sky- or seascapes. They are soupy realms where there is only color and light. And all of these things seem fleeting, as if in a state of disappearing. Schueler’s restrained and ethereal works tease out the inexplicable nature of material existence.

Schueler, who was born in Milwaukee in 1916 and died in 1992, is less known than his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. He slipped away to Scotland during the years when Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and others were taking the art-world’s center stage in New York.

“The abstraction of the sea and the sky...I was possessed by it, wanted to walk into it, to disappear into it,” he wrote of the landscape he was responding to. “I was exhausted afterward. There was no color I could define: The greys were not grey, the silver was not silver, the blacks were not black. It was all light and all darkness. Believe me, I have seen eternity, and it is frightening and it is most beautiful...”

In 1957, he became represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery and had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Dean Jensen Gallery was the first to exhibit Schueler in his home state. This exhibit is focused on the artist’s work from the 1970s. The gallery will be open 6 to 9 p.m. Friday and 10 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

You may have seen the headlines about it or heard the artist talking about political portrait of former Pope Benedict XVI on CNN, but this is your chance to see the artwork behind the controversy for yourself in a social and low-key setting. Niki Johnson was inspired to create a portrait of the former pontiff from thousands of colorful condoms after his remarks, while on a trip to Africa, suggesting that condoms could increase the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Gallery owner Debra Brehmer said she’s hoping that people who have strong opinions about the work, even negative ones, will feel welcome in the gallery.

Not to be overshadowed by this unique political artwork is an important exhibition of new work by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, a collaborative team. The gallery will be open Friday 5 to 9 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. Johnson will be present to talk about her work.

A newspaper article from 1913 called Frederick Layton Milwaukee’s “Grand Old Man,” the patriarch of the city’s “old guard,” a band of “old gentlemen” who were “still in the harness” and engaged in the public life despite the silver in their hair.

Layton, whose father owned a small butcher shop on Water St., was meatpacker and philanthropist most known for establishing the Layton Art Gallery, a long-gone architectural gem near Cathedral Square and a predecessor institution to the Milwaukee Art Museum. He traveled to Europe often, where he was exposed to art and collected voraciously.

To mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of that gallery and the origins of MAM, the museum has staged a series of exhibitions. A trove of Layton’s treasures have been hung salon style in Gallery 10, painted a bright red. Also on view is “Color Rush” and Isaac Julien’s installation in the contemporary galleries, which is in its final weeks. MAM After Dark takes place from 5 to midnight Friday. Admission is $13. The museum is open Saturday from 10 to 5 p.m. Admission is $15, $12 for students, seniors and military.

25th Anniversary Exhibit
Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee St.

With names like Uttech, Stonehouse and Solien in its stable of artists, the Tory Folliard Gallery is doing something right. Some of the very brightest artistic lights in the state and beyond are represented by the gallery, probably the city’s most shrewd commercial gallery and one of the best for contemporary painting.

To celebrate 25 years in business, the gallery will showcase more than 60 artists who have kept the quality of art on the walls consistently high, artists like Tom Uttech, Fred Stonehouse, T.L. Solien, ÖMark Mulhern, Charles Munch, Jason Rohlf, Sofia Arnold, Mark Brautigam, Clare Malloy and Flora Langlois. Many of the artists will be present Friday night, making the reception the greatest concentration of creative minds for the night, to be sure. Many have created new work especially for the show. The gallery will be open 5 to 9 p.m. Friday and 11 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

The senior thesis show at MIAD represents one of the most abundant and lively showcases of emerging artists you’ll find anywhere all year.

With the work of about 140 seniors, it is often an uneven show. Still, at this high-stakes jumping-off point in their careers, many of these young creatives put it all out there. If you are curious about the ways artists are rethinking what art can be today, this show is one of the places to see that experimentation in action.

Keep an eye out for Hayley Eichenbaum’s performative commentary on female narcissism. Her “Pilot” features a vanity that is part spaceship and “careens through the potentials of sculpture, design, engineering and live performance,” as it’s described on the school’s website. The show will be open Friday 5 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

"Out of the Wild: New work by Cassandra Smith"
Sky High Gallery, 2501 S. Howell Ave.

You may have seen Cassandra Smith's hand-painted deer antlers featured at Anthropologie, US Weekly, Better Homes & Gardens and, of course, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Those wonderful pieces are just a scratch at the surface of Smith's work, which often involves an expressive interplay with natural, organic forms. Smith is also the co-owner of Fine Line Magazine, an international arts magazine, and the former co-owner of The Armoury Gallery.

Come and celebrate some of the best news to hit Milwaukee's art community in a very long time: Mike Brenner recently secured the $750,000 in funding needed to launch his art-centric brewing business. The former owner of Hotcakes Gallery got an MBA at UWM and a brewmaster's license not only to pursue great beer making but to become an art patron as well. Mike is out and about with samples of his beers regularly, but this will be the first big, public event since the news broke last week. He'll be at one of his usual spots, Too Much Metal, where you'll find T-shirts with attitude, too.

ACLU of Wisconsin
207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 325

The American Civil Liberties Union will exhibit photography related to the Overpass Light Brigade project, or OLB, founded by artists Lisa Moline and Lane Hall, and work by Susan Simensky Bietila on Gallery Night. The OLB presents progressive political messages via Lite Brite-like lettered signs from overpasses. Bietila has been making art in collaboration with progressive movements since the 1960s. The ACLU space will be open from 5 to 10 p.m. Friday and 11 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Shelby Keefe and Richard Dorbin
The Urban Sanctuary, 181 N. Broadway

As a former artist in residence at the Pfister Hotel, painter Shelby Keefe learned what making art in a public place could do for her creative life and career. And she wants more.

So, she and her partner, photographer Richard Dorbin, will inaugurate a new gallery space in a century-old building on Gallery Night & Day.

Keefe has just won Plein Air Magazine’s award for “painting of the year” for a work titled “Alterations.” It was selected from a field of nearly 1,000 works submitted by artists around the world.

The gallery will be open Friday from 5 to 11 p.m. and Saturday from 11 to 5 p.m. She will do a painting demonstration on Saturday at 3 p.m.

Avant Garde Coffeehouse Project
Inova, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.

Underground, avant-garde artists have a way of finding each other and places to be. Coffeehouses, with their hot mugs of wake-up and a casual air, are as good a place as any, it’s been proven for generations. Here in Milwaukee, long before there was an Alterra or a Starbucks there was, for a little while, the Avant Garde Coffeehouse.

The Garde, as some called it, was a locus of folk and blues innovation, experimental film, poetry and performance art in the 1960s. An exhibit at Inova, the result of a research project at the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, brings the old haunt, once located at 2111 N. Prospect Ave., back to vivid life. Photography, ephemera, film footage and original sound recordings are on view. Inova will be open Friday 5 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday noon to 5 p.m. Saturday.

Kenilworth Open Studios
Kenilworth Square, 1925 E. Kenilworth Pl.This is the event where the Peck School of the Arts at UWM unfurls itsself. Visit the open studios and exhibition spaces of students and faculty alike, six floors of art, film screenings, music and performance. The MKE Unplugged Stage and vendor market up on the 6th floor will feature live music and nibbles and is new this year. The first 350 visitors get a free gift bag. The event is Saturday only from 11 to 2 p.m.

Dark Blue and Perimeter
Haggerty Museum of Art, 530 N. 13th St.

For millenniums, artists have explored the ways in which we engage with water. A wide-ranging exhibition of photographs around this theme called “Dark Blue” is rich with wonderful works. The only challenge is not getting lost in this sea of work, as there is a lot of work. Also on view is Kevin Miyazaki’s portrait of Lake Michigan, its people and changing nature, titled “Perimeter.” The museum is open Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. and Saturday from 10 to 4:30 p.m.

Stephanie Barenz
Pfister Hotel, 424 E. Wisconsin Ave.

When it was announced that Stephanie Barenz would be the next Pfister artist in residence, I described her work as being about the “in betweenness of travel and the things we carry with us.”

I had just seen a beautiful, thinly layered painting that she had created based on the accumulated impressions that her husband brought home to Milwaukee from a trip to India. The stories, architecture and textures of this distant place seemed so present in the piece. I am interested to see how this particular artist will respond to this stately hotel, full of stories and travelers with tales to tell.

Gallery Night represents her coming out as the new resident artist. The studio space, near the hotel’s lobby, will be open from 5 to 9 p.m., and a reception will follow at 9 p.m. with snacks and a cash bar. The space will also be open during the day Saturday.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Keep up with her coverage and subscribe to the weekly Art City newsletter (subscribe by clicking the link on the right hand of this page).

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.